Winemaking

During the harvest season, the grapes are hand harvested and delivered to the cellar in small crates (± 18 kg/crate). The grape bunches are tipped onto an initial sorting platform to remove MOG (Material Other than Grapes) and unripe or overripe grapes prior to crushing.

After this initial sorting process, the whole bunches go through a de-stemmer, where the berries are separated from the stalks and land on a sorting table for the second hand-sorting process.

The grapes are then crushed between two rubber rollers that are spaced in such a way that approximately 50% of the grapes go through as whole berries. The mash of juice and skins is then pumped into the fermentation tanks.

Our red wines are fermented in open vats called “kuipe” and we manually punch down the skins during fermentation with stainless steel paddles (“pigeage”). This labour-intensive process allows for the optimum extraction of colour and tannin in our red wines.

At the end of the fermentation process, we press the skins in wooden basket presses and pump the young wines into stainless steel tanks and oak barrels. The wines mature in barrels for between 18 – 36 months, allowing enough time for the natural clarification of the wine through the settling and racking method.

We do not use any enzymes, fining agents, centrifuges or filters to clarify our red wines. However, we do cold-stabilize and filter our Cape Rosé blend prior to bottling.

Our bottling system has evolved over the years and we are now able to bottle very gently without using any pumps. The wine flows via gravity through a cartridge filter, from our upper level bottling tanks into a manual 6-head filling machine.

Our bottled wines are kept in ideal conditions until we choose to release a certain vintage, after which the final capsuling, labelling, and packaging is all done by hand.